The Masque of the Black Tulip (25 page)

Vaughn bowed in a courtly way utterly at odds with his previous behavior, and exited, shutting the door deliberately behind him. Skirts bunched in her hands, balanced on the very balls of her feet, Henrietta tiptoed over to the panel through which Vaughn had just departed. She paused for a moment, ear against the wall, listening to the sound of footsteps recede along the corridor, Vaughn's stride swift and assured, the other's a limp and a shuffle, scurrying to keep up.

Good. Vaughn was well and truly gone. For how long he would remain so was another matter entirely.

Hazel eyes narrowed in concentration, Henrietta examined the wall panel, with its porcelain pagodas and gilded dragons. Henrietta didn't care how much fire they breathed; she was determined to find the secret catch that opened the door before Vaughn returned.

Reaching up, she ran her fingers along the gilded frame of a painted porcelain scene, and yanked her hand back again in surprise. The china was set into the wall itself, the frame a trompe l'oeil illusion designed to give the impression of substance. The curls and protrusions that appeared so ripe for manipulation were nothing more than brushstrokes in gilt against the wood of the wall, as useless to her as the mask that lay discarded by her side.

Henrietta schooled her breathing, concentrating on drawing air past the ridges of her corset. Calm, she had to stay calm. Taking deep, exaggerated inhalations, she lifted both hands, palm up, and ran them down the length of the wall. If all else failed, at least now that she knew where the proper panel was, she could lie in wait for Vaughn's return. For him to enter, as he must, the panel would have to open, and she could bash him over the head with the heavy silver carafe he had used to cool the champagne.

Henrietta's lips twisted in a slightly hysterical smile. Miles would approve. He was a great advocate of head-bashing.

But it hadn't come to that yet, she reminded herself, squaring her shoulders. At least, not quite yet. The porcelain panels yielded no cracks or protrusions that might hide the mechanism that bolted the door. One boasted a dragon as part of the scene; the dragon was, appropriately enough, bearing off a hapless village maiden to parts unknown. The maiden didn't seem all that unhappy to be borne. Perhaps Chinese dragons were kinder to their prey than their European counterparts? mused Henrietta irrelevantly, pressing hard upon the body of the dragon. Nothing budged. Dragon and maiden remained endlessly journeying, flat against their fragile base, forever in flight.

Forever. Funny how she had never found that word quite so sinister until now. Shivering in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature in the little room, Henrietta dropped to her knees, feeling around the base of the panel with hands that were increasingly unsteady. Finer than a brushstroke, she could see the crack that marked the join of the door, taunting her with its presence.

"Why won't you open?" she hissed.

The door, smug and silent, forbore to answer.

Unfortunately, not everything was as silent. Oh heavens, were those steps she heard in the hallway? Spurred by panic, Henrietta jammed a fingernail desperately at the divide. The nail broke. The door remained stubbornly shut. If she couldn't even wiggle a nail into the space, how could she hope to lever it open with anything more substantial? She settled back on her haunches, staring sightlessly ahead of her. It would have to be the carafe, wouldn't it? There was nothing else she could do, nothing else she could try. She had pushed and prodded every inch of the door, run her hands over every panel, yanked on every protrusion. She was, she admitted to herself hopelessly, well and truly caught.

The two dragons, propping up their velvet bench, sneered at her in gilded smugness, twin Cerberus to her Persephone.

Dragons! Of course! Henrietta rocked back on her heels, a new burst of optimism firing her veins. They were so far below eye level that she had never thought of them, but if one was designing a secret lever, wouldn't one want to make it as unlikely as possible? It was, at least, a chance, and a better one than attempting to bludgeon Vaughn senseless with the carafe.

She poked them in their round, staring eyes. She yanked on their little, pointed ears. She prodded their paws. She tugged on their lolling tongues. And then, just as she was about to consign them to perdition and herself to an undignified tussle with her host, the tongue of the dragon on the right shifted as she pulled. A movement! It had moved, hadn't it? Half-afraid to hope, Henrietta heaved harder. The long tongue curled forward and forward again, until deep in the recesses of the door something clicked.

With a sound like a spring being released, the door slid smoothly forward.

MILES BURST INTO THE FRONT HALL of Vaughn's mansion, nearly careening into a scowling Black Death. Black Death swirled his tattered draperies out of the way as Miles barreled by, searching for Hen. Dash it all, where was she? Miles fought his way through a dizzying throng of masked revelers. They eddied around him like a medieval painter's dazed nightmare, men with heads like birds, women in huge, feathered masks, all laughing and dancing with frenetic gaiety. Miles twisted past, looking, searching, blotting out the high-pitched voices and blur of shapes, focused entirely on finding Hen.

Miles experienced a spurt of relief as he spotted Penelope's familiar red head towards the back of the second room. Where there was Penelope, there was usually… no. Henrietta wasn't there. Miles skidded to a stop, panting, in front of Penelope.

"Have you seen Henrietta?" he demanded.

The Dowager Duchess poked him with a bronze-headed spear. "You're late!" she cackled.

"Henrietta?" snapped Miles dangerously, slapping away the spear. "You were supposed to be bloody chaperoning her!"

There was a tug on his sleeve. "She went looking for you." Charlotte bit her lip. She, at least, Miles noticed, had the good sense to look worried. "She didn't find you?"

Miles leaned forward earnestly, not even flinching when the dowager prodded his ribs with her instrument of torture. "Which way did she go?"

Charlotte pointed down the room, towards the open French doors that led into the music room, thronged, as was the ballroom, with masked revelers. "She went off that way. But it was some time ago."

"You're a good man, Lady Charlotte." Miles clapped her on the back and bounded off in the direction indicated.

"Mr. Dorrington! Wait!"

Miles skidded to a halt.

"She was wearing a blue robe a I'anglaise," said Charlotte rapidly. "With a gold mask."

Miles nodded his appreciation and plunged back into the crowd. He didn't stop to ask Charlotte what a robe a I'anglaise was. Some sort of dress, no doubt. Any additional explanation would be superfluous, time consuming, and largely incomprehensible.

He saw red and white dresses and yellow dresses worn with enough gold masks to re-cover the dome of St. Peter's, he saw blue dresses paired with silver masks and black masks and masks of molting feathers, but no blue dress with a gold mask and no Henrietta. By the time he had made his way to the last of the reception rooms, Miles had passed frantic ana was on his way to desperate. She wasn't anywhere downstairs. No one remembered seeing her. Nor, for that matter, could anyone recall having seen their host for quite some time.

Miles's mind teemed with unpleasant possibilities. Could Vaughn have kidnapped her, and carried her off to the cellars, bound and gagged? Had she been smuggled out through a window and carted off to some deserted hunting lodge in the countryside? Or had Vaughn simply taken Henrietta upstairs? Miles blanched, remembering that large, canopied bed, with its cavorting nymphs. With the noise generated by five hundred squawking guests, no one would hear Henrietta scream.

Miles turned to bolt for the front hall and the stairs to the upper regions, when a familiar hand settled on his arm.

"Dorrington!" exclaimed Turnip Fitzhugh. "Smashing party, eh, what?"

Miles shook Turnip's hand off. "You haven't seen Henrietta Selwick about, have you?"

"Lady Henrietta? No, I can't say that I have, but I did see Charlotte Lansdowne, and she looked absolutely smashing—dressed as a shepherdess, you know, with a little sheep. I say, your costume's not quite the thing! What are you supposed to be, old chap?"

"An incompetent duelist," clipped Miles. "Look, have you seen—"

"An incompetent duelist…" Turnip mulled it over. "Ha! Very clever. An incompetent duelist! Wait till I tell—"

"Fitzhugh!" Miles roared over Turnip's chuckles.

"What?"

"Have. You. Seen. Lord. Vaughn?"

"Oh, our host? You don't have to worry about paying your respects; it's such a crush, the man'll never know the difference. I—"

"Have you seen him?" Miles gritted out, reminding himself that it wasn't at all the done thing to strangle old school friends just because they were nattering on while Henrietta could be being attacked or tortured or… maybe strangulation wasn't too extreme. Why was he even wasting his time? "Never mind," he said curtly. "I'll see you later."

"Vaughn went that way," said Turnip amiably.

"What?" Miles spun back around on his heel.

"You were looking for Lord Vaughn, weren't you? Don't know why you'd want to, but—"

Miles grabbed Turnip by the shoulders. "Was there a woman with him? A woman in a blue dress with a gold mask?"

"Easy there, old chap! There was, at that. Toothsome piece, too. Dorrington?"

Miles was already elbowing his way through the throng in the direction Turnip had indicated, with only one thought in his mind. To find Hen. Right away.

A door at the end of the room took him into an ill-lit hallway, eerily dark and silent after the hubbub behind him. Damnation. Miles picked up speed. He had a feeling he knew what he'd find at the end of the corridor— a concealed stair leading up to the upper regions. And once he got there…

Miles didn't have much time to figure out exactly how he was going to reallocate Vaughn's anatomy (and to hell with keeping him in one piece for interrogation purposes), because at that very moment he barreled into something small and human, that let out a very feminine-sounding "Ooof!" as it banged into him.

Acting on instinct, Miles grabbed her by the shoulders to keep the woman from toppling over. They tottered together for a moment. The woman's mask tumbled to the ground, and her head tilted back to reveal a very familiar pale, oval face, just as she blurted out, "Miles?"

"Hen?" Miles exclaimed incredulously, tightening his grip on her shoulders, as though he were afraid she would disappear if he let go.

His brown eyes roved anxiously across her face, across those wonderfully familiar tip-tilted hazel eyes, that small, straight nose, the lips that had fallen slightly open in surprise and delight.

"Dammit, Hen, do you know how worried I was?" he said thickly, and, before he could think better of it, before he could remember that she was his best friend's sister and they were in the middle of a corridor in the house of a potentially deadly French spy, before he could remember anything other than that she was Hen, and she was safe, and he was so damn relieved he might bloody well burst with it, Miles wrapped his arms around her as tightly as they would go and captured her lips with his.

* * *

Assignation: a rendezvous with a fellow agent under pretense of amorous dalliance

—from the Personal Codebook of the Pink Carnation

It took Henrietta a moment to realize that she was being well and truly kissed by Miles. His lips moved across her own with a fervor born of anxiety, molding the contours of her lips to his, squeezing her so tightly that the dreaded corset bit into her back and any air that might have remained in her lungs thought better of staying. Henrietta didn't care. She wrapped her arms around Miles's neck, clinging as tightly to him as he was to her, glorying in the feel of his warm skin through the thin linen of his shirt, the scent of sandalwood and cheroots, the soft ends of his hair tickling her fingertips.

"God, Hen," he murmured, pressing little kisses along the corner of her mouth, as if he couldn't bear to move away for even so long as it would take to speak, "you had me so worried. When I thought"— kiss—"what that man could"—kiss, kiss—"be doing to you…"

Henrietta cut off whatever he was about to say by the simple expedient of rising on her tiptoes and stopping his mouth with a kiss. His mouth tasted slightly of brandy, salty, intoxicating—not that Henrietta needed any inebriant; she was as deliciously lightheaded as she had been that night when Miles snuck her that first glass of champagne.

Miles rapidly lost any interest in continuing what he had been about to say, his lips slanting to meet hers, and his hand tangling in her hair, tilting her face to meet his. His roving fingers dislodged one of the large pearl combs that decorated her old-fashioned coiffure. It clattered on the parquet floor, the sound reverberating through Miles's dazed brain like the tolling of a thousand warning bells.

Releasing her, Miles staggered back, eyes glazed and heart hammering. Meanwhile, his brain, returned from its brief vacation, was loudly screaming, Oh hell, oh hell, oh hell. Certain other parts of his body were also clamoring for attention, but Miles ignored them. They had gotten him into enough trouble already. Oh, hell. He hadn't really just kissed Henrietta, had he? It could have been a daydream, a hallucination. Miles caught sight of Henrietta's gleaming eyes and swollen lips. That would have had to have been one bloody convincing hallucination.

"It's, um, good that you're safe," he said lamely, sticking his hands in his pockets.

"Mm-hmm," agreed Henrietta, beaming up at him with her head tilted up towards him at an angle that practically invited… Miles took an extra step back; he would have made the sign against the evil eye, too, if he'd thought it would do him any good. God help him, all he wanted to do was kiss her again. Miles found himself addressing his Maker on terms of intimacy he hadn't employed for many a year.

Since God didn't seem to want to be obliging about sending thunderbolts or the like to serve as a diversion—Miles thought glumly that he probably deserved at least one of those thunderbolts through his own thick skull—Miles took refuge in indignation.